My closest friend from childhood recently emailed and said that he had found my journal, that I had left in his closet about 23 years ago. He sent it to me and it arrived in the mail on Friday.

The first thing I noticed was that the first many pages were in Peter’s writing—it was a long, long list of books he intended to read or re-read. Then, Peter must have given me the thing, and I started using it as my journal, from January 1984, to July 1985. (I turned 14 in February 1984). Interestingly, while I remember many of the events described in it, I have absolutely no recollection of writing it. At the end of my July 1985 entry, I closed with words “And the name died before the man,” from AE Housman’s classic poem, “To an Athlete Dying Young,” and I never wrote another word in the journal.

But the journal had no literary aspirations whatever. That was the first and last time I quoted poetry in it.

I was struck by many things, particularly:

--My gratuitous use of swear words. I used the f-word on a constant basis, almost as punctuation. I don’t think I was a particularly angry youth, just a profane one. I also wrote “Damn!” quite a bit.

--The vernacular of the times. I consistently used “rad” (for “radical”) meaning “great” or “good.”

--Some of my shortcomings were on obvious display in certain of the journal entries, and perhaps not surprisingly, are still with me today.

--I was an exceptionally poor math student, which probably gave Peter the fits. I fumed in one of the entries that my math teacher told Peter that I “hadn’t passed a single test all semester,” but in reality, I whined in the journal, I had earned “a couple of D’s” along with the F’s. I was furious that the teacher had said that I hadn’t passed any tests, since my assumption at the time was that a D was a passing grade. Somewhat miraculously, when I took calculus in college four years later, something clicked and through perspiration and inspiration, math really made sense for the first time. And then it became easy. But if you gave me a calculus test today, I would probably fail it.

--My lack of money. I fumed about having to pay an extra three dollars for a ticket for a friend, and I often wrote about my lack of funds. But l also wrote about my many paper routes and the cases of baseball cards I bought with almost all of paper route earnings. I was fairly scrappy, supplementing paper route earnings with selling pistachio nuts at the Palo Alto Farmer’s Market on Saturday mornings, and taking all sorts of other jobs. Most of the money went to buying baseball cards and comic books. At one point, I had about 100,000 baseball cards and fortuitously made some good buys. About six years later, I sold about 80,000 of them to help pay for college.

--Of course, as any 14-15 year old boy might, I had carbonated hormones. Fortunately, I did not write anything too incriminating, but I fell “like a blind roofer” for girls on a regular basis.

--My beer bottle collection. I proudly noted in my journal that my collection of empty beer bottles had increased to 230 different types. I think Peter had his own reasons for encouraging me to collect the empty bottles.

--My cross-country and track exploits. I had sort of forgotten how central the team was to my life. My running career “took off” when I realized I had substantially no skills at the “skilled” sports… I couldn’t play basketball, tennis, or baseball (I did fine until they started throwing curve balls, which compelled me to retire from baseball at the ripe old age of 13). And I was perhaps the worst golfer and skier many people had ever seen. So it was running by default. In my freshman year of high school, I made the varsity team and won some races and generally acquitted myself well. When I set a record for the fastest time ever by a freshman on my school's cross-country course, the school newspaper called me the “Freshman Sensation” and it only went to my head a little bit.

Perhaps most importantly, the journal brought back mostly happy memories of my friend C. (who sent me the journal and was prominently featured in it) and his mom. In many respects, I was a somewhat troubled youth, particularly between the ages of 10 and 15, and between my mom's death and my dad's foibles, I was probably in desperate need of stability and friendship and guidance…which C. and his mom provided for several crucial years. And I shall never forget it, and never stop being thankful for it.